Cali - The Land of Fruit and Truck Nuts

What do a pair of low-hanging balls and a pair of missing front teeth have in common? C'mon. Try harder. You can't guess?

Well I never would have guessed either ... that both bizarre pairs would color my day yesterday. One blushed my cheeks to pink and the other whitewashed my face to an even paler shade of pale.

Let's start with the danglers. There I was sitting at a red light at a busy crosswalk on the local city college campus. Cheeks and Pigtails gazed straight ahead, out the front windshield, right along with their cold coffee-guzzling mama at the iPod plugged up 18 to 24 set. The three of us were blissfully glazed over six-feet deep into our collegiate people watching when a yacht-sized Chevy Tahoe pulled up next to us in the wake of its own Richter scale bass booms.

I rolled my eyes and rolled up my minivan windows. (I know. What a shock that a suburban mom of three drives a friggin' minivan and shudders in response to bombastic bass. Duh.) I shifted my annoyed gaze downward as the Tahoe inched forward, nearly nudging the bumper of the Toyota hybrid in front of it. Ironic.

Perhaps by now you've heard the term "deez nuts." Then again, not all moms listen to hip-hop day-in and day-out like I do. Well, as I glanced downward below the Tahoe's bumper, I noticed a stoplight red pair of "deez nuts " swinging gently to and fro in the spot where a boat hook would normally stick out. Truck balls are the new antennae ball gone plural and flipped upside down from the back end. TRUCK BALLS?

Yes, a plastic red pair of what appeared to be human testicle replicas hung low from the danged Tahoe. If they didn't suck hard enough already, they lacked authenticity for a number of reasons: they were perfectly smooth, they glinted, perfectly reflecting the Southern California sun, both balls were perfectly even in size and neither hung higher or lower than the other, and THEY dangled NOT FROM A MAN, BUT A FROM A TRUCK, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

It's too (coffee draught) early in the morning to go into the gummy gaps that appeared instead teeth in the trucker-swearing mouths of two of my fellow parenting class students last night. After only one class out of the nine to come, I can already confidently say that I'm a far better mother than I thought. I think I was the only mother there of my own volition, not by court order. I'll share the horror stories from class when I'm on a full stomach later.

Hopefully the recent ball-dangling fad doesn't hang on. Oh, and, uh, truck squirrels, please keep your balls to your nut hoarding selves.

BALL-CENTRIC UPDATE: I Googled "truck balls" and found this lame ad copy: "Bumper nuts, bumper balls, truck nutz, truck balls, truck nuts, hitch nuts, big balls, bulls balls, bull balls, big boy nuts, bike balls, car balls and hanging nuts are not all the same thing, our imitators would like you to think so." Thanks Bulls Balls company, "home of the Big'Uns," for making my day a little nuttier.

I can rest easier at night knowing that Bulls Balls' Truck Nuts "are available in four styles, many colors including Bright Chrome, Bright Brass, Diamond Plate and Camouflage" that will "hang easily on all your rigs, in many ways. They're made to Swing™!" How appropriate that in the "How to Hang Bumper Balls" FAQ over at Bumper Nuts, the manufacturer advises against hanging truck balls from your rig with CHICKEN WIRE. What does that tell you about the type of folks they're addressing?

Maybe, just maybe, my Dodge minivan can be the first mama-mobile to sport a saggy pair of post-breastfeeding flapjack boobs. What's next? Episiotomy car-ginas? What other inanimate objects can our sex-salivating society sexualize? More importantly, when I can have balls on my blender?